A way to somewhere else

Since his suicide in 2008 at the age of 46, David Foster Wallace’s influence on contemporary literature has expanded to the point where even writers who haven’t read him struggle to keep out of his shadow. Traces of his style can be found every time a young writer uses a compound conjunction, or a comically extended footnote. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, the first biography of Wallace, has the difficult task of chronicling his life and work while we are still coming to terms with their impact.

Born in the American Midwest to liberal and academic parents (the kind who read Ulysses to each other before bed and tolerated their teenage son’s pot-smoking), Wallace was unusually clever from the start. D.T. Max doesn’t dwell on Wallace’s well-known talent for tennis (a successful player, though never close to world class) and spends more time on his intellectual precocity. Wallace’s father, who is a teacher of philosophy, said that his son’s mind was faster than that of ‘any undergraduate I have ever taught’.